…was the tongue-in-cheek title of an image that I posted to Twitpic this week. It shows the usage of the word “novel” in PubMed article titles over time. As someone correctly pointed out at FriendFeed, it needs to be corrected for total publications per year. It was inspired by a ...

Egon writes: Can someone please plot the BioStar users on a Google Map? Sounds like a challenge. Let’s go. 1. Harvesting user IP addresses BioStar user profiles (here’s mine) include a location field. It’s free text and optional, which means that location is missing or inaccurate for many ...

The colossus of bioinformatics meetings, ISMB, convened in Boston this year from July 9 – 13. As in recent years, the meeting was covered online at its website, FriendFeed and Twitter. I thought it would be fun to run a quick analysis of activity at the FriendFeed room using R. 1. Fetch the data ...

Networks – social and biological – are all the rage, just now. Indeed, a recent entry at Duncan’s QOTD described the “hairball” network representation as the dominant cultural icon in molecular biology. I’ve not had occasion to explore networks “professionally”, but have always been fascinated by both networks and the ...

Here’s the situation. Web applications, built using a framework (e.g. Rails, Django) are great for fetching data from a database and rendering it. They’re not so great for crunching and charting the data. Conversely, R is great for crunching and charting, but doesn’t make for a ...

I generally skip over “From the Blogosphere”, a (mostly) weekly-summary of one or two blog posts in Nature’s “Authors” section (here is the latest). Why? Well, I’ve always suspected that the title is rather misleading. Now, I have the hard numbers to prove it. My feed reader contains ...

It’s Christmas Eve tomorrow and so I declare the year over. My Christmas gift to you is a summary of activity in 2009 at the FriendFeed Life Scientists group. It’s crafted using R + Ruby, with raw data and some code snippets available. If you want to see the most ...

I was prompted by a thread on the apparent decline of FriendFeed to look for evidence of declining participation in my networks. First, a quick and dirty Ruby script, tls.rb to grab the Life Scientists feed and count the likes and comments: #!/usr/bin/ruby require 'rubygems' require 'json/...